Ethical Approaches to Marketing

Positive Contributions to Society

Carolyn Strong

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783111257716
• eBook ISBN: 9783110655735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Etica aziendale
• Index: Business

Ethical approaches to marketing offers a dynamic and inspiring perspective on how powerful marketing can have a positive and ethical impact on society. It brings together a wealth of internationally acclaimed academics who share their thoughts on a broad range of ethical approaches to marketing. With the continued and unwavering criticism of marketing across the globe, with accusations of persuasion, exploitation and manipulation and more this book aims to open the minds of the reader to the constructive and progressive approaches of ethical marketers. It reframes the way we think about marketing and society offering a number of emotional and motivational topics written by world leading academics, bringing together the great minds of ethical academics in a profound and dynamic monograph. The range of scholars includes new and upcoming academics taking on the opportunity to publish their work alongside eminent scholars. Contributions support the notion that marketing is good for society and impacts on consumer wellbeing, lifestyle, communities and positive consumer behaviours. This book asks the reader to think differently, feel the change that is rapidly developing in marketing through the interconnections of personal ethical values which are becoming interdependent with professional marketing values.

"As problems linked to health, the environment and social injustice mount during the 21st century, harnessing the power of marketing to help find and promote positive solutions is going to be crucial for all our futures. Billy Bob Thornton once claimed publicly that 'Marketing is the Devil', but this collection demonstrates the potential for marketing and marketers to make important contributions on the side of the angels." (Professor Ken Peattie)

1 Apathy in the UK? The New Lifestyle Political Activism of Ethical Consumerism

Mike Marinetto

Introduction

Can shopping can change the world? Or to put it another way: can consumer choices exert pressures on companies and even governments to create social change? To help us think about these questions, I invite the reader to think back in time. Specifically, to the late eighteenth century and to the eastern seaboard of North America.

It was one of the most notorious acts of political vandalism and direct action in British history. In September and October 1773, seven ships carrying East India Company tea from China, were sent to the American colonies: four were bound for Boston, and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The various ships bound for British America held more than 2,000 chests containing nearly 600,000 pounds of tea. In December a group of political agitators known as the Sons of Liberty forcibly boarded the four merchant ships in the Boston Harbour. Around seventy men, some dressed as Native Americans, threw $18,000 worth of tea overboard into the Boston Harbour. Unbeknown to the Sons of Liberty at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would result, some two-and-a-half years later, in the Declaration of Independence (Unger 2012, p. 5–7).

It was not so much the quality of the tea that motivated this historic act of vandalism. The good burghers of Boston were somewhat incensed by the British parliament’s imposition of a tax on all imported tea by colonial (that is, American) merchants. And there was a supplementary caveat which added to colonial fury: the British East India Company could import Chinese tea to America without paying any tax. This not only disadvantaged colonial merchants but was also regarded as an undemocratic imposition by politicians unelected by Americans, which inspired the tea party slogan: no taxation without representation. The British Parliament responded in 1774 with an iron fist, befitting the world’s first modern super-power. Inter alia, the government passed laws from London which ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed commerce in Boston. Further protests followed, culminating in the American Revolutionary War or the American War of Independence. The war started in 1775, unsurprisingly, near Boston.

For historians, the Boston Tea Party was the decisive catalyst in the revolution that freed the American colonies from British rule. But those events of 1774 in Boston were the climax of a wider and longer struggle against British rule. And tea, or more specifically taxes levied on tea, were often the focus, although not the only cause, of the anti-colonial struggle. In this pre-revolutionary struggle, we find the earliest, possibly first, examples of politically motivated consumerism.

In the 1760s, a subterranean protest movement surfaced against the new taxes imposed on the colonies from London. A particular strategy used by the colonist agitators was to organise boycotts against the consumption of British tea. One of the leaders of the movement, the lawyer and activist and eventual founding father, John Adams, demanded it a patriotic duty to abstain from drinking tea. And alternatives to a British brew emerged. Activists in New England even produced domestic, home-grown tea and during the revolution itself tea drinking declined, and coffee eventually became the drink of choice for colonists loyal to the new flag. It was in these early skirmishes of the American Revolutionary War which saw the birth of ethical consumerism. This historical episode suggests, anecdotally, how ethical consumerism can in fact spearhead and have a role in significant social and political change. But this historically arrived at ‘hypothesis’ needs to be fleshed out and updated.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Boston Tea Party, ethical consumerism is now a staple feature of today’s world and is very much part of the commercial landscape. For proponents, there is a case to be made that it can empower people to act politically against irresponsible forces, namely, multinational companies or even governments. Here, consumerism exerts ‘social control’. Ethical buyers are at the forefront of a new style of politics, less reliant on political parties and working instead through lifestyle choices. This new form of politics is concerned with single issue causes rather than broad programmes of reform. We have an alternative style of political activism.

The chapter will attempt to assess the potential influence and impact of ethical consumerism today. It will focus on how ethical consumerism works and the crucial role of pressure groups in organising consumers. But there are inevitably inbuilt limits to ethical consumerism as political activism. This will lead us to explore alternatives, arguing that a more powerful statement would be to change our lifestyles, to consume less. Here, I make the case for a radical consumerism.

Never Mind the Ballots … Here Comes the Ethical Consumer

There is a widely held view that political apathy is endemic in Western democracies like the UK, a fact characterized by the decline in voter turnout at general elections. For example, the elections of 2001 and 2005 in the UK produced the lowest levels of voter turnout since the First World War. The UK Elections that took place during the 1950s saw around 80 per cent of voters participating in the ballots. But in recent times the average turnout has levelled off at just over two-thirds of the electorate. At in the recent 2019 election, 67.3 per cent of the registered electorate bothered to vote, down 1.5 per cent from the 2017 election. The historical trajectory of voting patterns, as a measure of public engagement and involvement, suggests that Britain’s population is becoming a passive citizenry or at worst an indolent and apathetic citizenry, disengaging from politics and therefore wider civil society.

That could be one conclusion which could be drawn from voter behaviour. However, there is a different interpretation about the decline in voting. We may be no less apathetic today but the population is channelling its activism via other channels. This is the conclusion reached by political geographer Charles Pattie and his colleagues from Sheffield University. They used empirical data to dismiss the popular and rather pessimistic claim that Britain is becoming more apathetic. They conducted a major survey in the early 2000s of civic attitudes and engagement of the British public. The authors called this survey a Citizen Audit.

The evidence from Pattie et al.’s Citizen Audit survey suggests Britain, at the start of the twenty-first century, is far from conforming to this gloomy prognosis about the state of the civic body politic. Active citizenship is still very much in evidence amongst the populous and there exists a strong normative commitment towards citizenship (Pattie et al. 2003). But the range of activism and public engagement has widened and is not just focused on voting. Admittedly, the British public is less involved in ‘traditional’ party politics, although the growth in the membership of the Labour party under the former leader Jeremy Corbyn has bucked this trend to an extent. Pattie et al. note:

While there can be no doubt that some people do pay out for others to become engaged, on average people engage in three forms of political action over 12 months, of which giving money is only one. The average citizen engages in two additional forms of political action. Furthermore, while membership of organisations may be passive, in the sense that apart from paying out a membership subscription no further engagement in the organisation takes place, the evidence from the Citizen Audit suggests that a significant proportion of people give their time to associational life.

(2003, p. 632)

The other key conclusion to take from the Citizenship Audit is that political engagement in the twenty-first century is more individualistic than in the past. Active citizens tend to prioritise single-issue causes like climate change and people are also still locally active. The Citizen Audit clearly reveals that Britain is definitely not in the grip of political apathy. And one such issue that supports Pattie’s conclusions is the growth of ethical consumerism.

Ethical consumerism, essentially, is the conscious application of specific ethical principles and criteria to the everyday, often mundane activity of shopping. This covers the consumption not only of goods bit also services. This can take on the following forms: Firstly, there are ethical boycotts of products associated with companies or countries that have an ethically dubious reputation. Secondly, it involves positive purchasing or buycotting which favours ethical products (energy saving light bulbs), involving the conscious purchase of products that were made without harming or exploiting humans, animals or the natural environment. Buycotting also involves favouring businesses that operate under social rather than market principles. And certainly, in recent years, there has been a distinct growth and expansion of consumers looking to buy ethically. Consumer spending on green goods from Fairtrade food to eco-friendly travel grown significantly. The ethical market in the UK was worth £46.8bn in 2011. Sales of ethical goods and services grew by 8.8 per cent in 2014 according to the Co-operative Group’s annual Ethical Consumerism Report. While it remains a small proportion of the total annual consumer spend of around £700 billion, the report shows the growth in ethical consumerism continues to outstrip the market as a whole.

But is ethical consumerism a well-intentioned commercial activity or part of a lose political movement in the same way as the American Tea Party? According to Clarke et al. (2007), ethical consumerism is indeed a ‘political phenomenon’. As a political act, it deploys ideas about corporate responsibility in the pursuit of, what Clarke et al call, classic political objectives: mobilizing collective agents, lobbying and claim making. They suggest that ethical consumerism is also something that can work hand in hand with other collective modes of activism. The political rationale is that buying ethically can result in social change, Noreena Hertz the self-proclaimed campaigning academic, and so-called Nigella Lawson of economics, is someone who early on in the new century latched on to the potential power of ethical consumerism when it was very much at a nascent stage of development. For Hertz, the commercial growth and expansion of ethical consumerism has more than economic implications, making the case for the way that consumerism can be used to change the behaviour of companies. Hertz’ assumes that in the modern economy consumers have more potential influence over the business sector than governments.

Hertz makes the rather uncontroversial claim that despite the long battle for universal suffrage, the general voting public is becoming weary and disillusioned by mainstream democratic and party politics. People are, in Hertz’ words ‘disengaging from traditional politics’. This is not a specifically British disease but something blighting mature Western democracies. But echoing the findings from Sheffield University’s Citizen Audit, Hertz argues that the decline of democratic participation does not amount to an inexorable spiral of political apathy and disengagement from politics. Political activism and interest in social causes is finding other, alternative outlets: ‘It is because of the fact that instead of showing up at the voting booth to register their demands and wants, people are turning to corporations. The most effective way to be political today is not cast your vote at the ballot box but to do so at the supermarket or at a shareholder’s meeting. Why? Because corporations respond.’ (2001, p. 190) In fact, Hertz goes a step further.

Hertz argues that ethical consumerism and consumer choices at the supermarket are more effective in pressuring companies when compared to the leviathan bureaucracy that is the central state. To drive this point home, Hertz points to the genetically modified (GM) food controversy of the 1990s. Whilst governments dithered about the potential health benefits or otherwise of GM foods, the main supermarkets pulled GM products from their shelves in the wake of consumer unrest. And then there is the example of the sweatshop controversy embroiling Nike and Reebok. Governments did hardly anything to prevent or reform the corporate practice of contracting out production to overseas facilities in developing countries where wages are low, and regulations close to non-existent. But it was corporations responding to consumer boycott campaigns that came up with innovative plans for dealing with child labour.

Clearly there is a public distrust and concern over corporate power and the moral negligence of the commercial practices of the world’s largest companies. And, partly in response to these wider public concerns, corporations are taking a more prominent role in society, attempting to alleviate poverty and to promote social justice and environmental sustainability. Corporate social responsibility policies and practices have now gone mainstream. Few of the Fortune 500 companies will not have significant CSR programmes. But Hertz is aware the corporate social turn is far from being wholehearted and remains a practice that is strategically rather than ethically driven: ‘Their contribution to society’s over- all needs will always remain marginal, and their contribution to welfare will never be comprehensive. Unlike politicians who are charged with looking after their citizens’ interests, these corporations have no such mandate. Their motives are commercial rather than moral, and so will be subject to market vagaries’. (2001, p. 192)

It seems that with ethical consumerism, people are taking the matter of reforming capitalism and the harbingers of global capital (corporations) into their own hands. For Hertz, people are demanding that corporations demonstrate more ethical practices – governments are either unwilling or unable force such companies to make such changes. And says Hertz, these are not the demands of what she calls ‘the brown rice-eating sandal-wearing brigade’, but of wide- spread demands amongst consumers for corporate social responsibility, transparency and integrity. Hertz quotes one survey which revealed that 60 per cent of British consumers are prepared to boycott companies or products because of ethical standards. In America, the number of would-be product boycotters is higher according to Hertz: around 75 per cent of American would boycott companies for selling products made in sweatshops.

Government in Hertz’ reckoning is secretly happy for consumer boycotts to manifest themselves: ‘And while corporations, bidden by consumers, are increasingly taking on the role of global politicians, what are politicians doing? They are tacitly endorsing consumer activism. Consumer politics is the new politics, and politicians are stepping aside to make space so that consumers can become to an ever-greater extent agents of political change.’ (2001, p. 191) So how does ethical consumer boycotting work and is it as effective as Hertz makes out?

Ethical Consumerism as Boycotting

One of the formative studies of ethical consumerism in the field of business ethics is ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Apathy in the UK? The New Lifestyle Political Activism of Ethical Consumerism
• 2 The Usefulness of the Social Identity Approach to Social Marketing
• 3 Social Responsibility Communication of Corporates: A Consumer Marketing Perspective
• 4 Ethical and Social Marketing in Asia: A Multi-Country Perspective
• 5 As the Planet and the Climate Breakdown the Last Thing We Need is More Marketing
• 6 What People Actually Know about Posthumous Organ Donation
• 7 Fairtrade Towns: A Community Based Social Marketing Perspective in Promoting Ethical Consumption
• 8 Wielded by a Different Hand: A Framework for Assessing the Ethicality of Social Marketing Behaviour Change Programs
• 9 Blurred Minds Parent Program: Applying Marketing to Start Teenage Conversations
• 10 Social Media and Health Promotion
• 11 Chinese Consumers’ Values and Perspectives of Sustainable Consumption
• 12 The Passing of Time and Consumption Behavior of the Elderly in Three Countries: Differences and Similarities
• Concluding Comment
• Index